Why are so many in the GOP ignoring Paul Ryan’s budget plans?
March 3rd, 2010That’s an easy answer — too many of them are either unimaginative or care more about power and partisan victories than actually dealing with the big issues.
From Newsweek:
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which produces Congress’s official projections about the long-term fiscal effects of legislation, Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future would zero out the deficit, balance the budget by 2063, and reduce Medicare’s expected share of the economy in 2080 from a projected 14.3 percent of GDP to a mere 4 percent. The Roadmap also calls for a substantial simplification of the tax code and a replacement of the corporate income tax with an 8.5 percent business consumption tax. CBO’s projections are inherently uncertain—even the most competent economic forecasters can only guess at how the world will change over 50-plus years. But the result is, at the very least, a compelling conservative vision of the country’s fiscal future.
But is that something they’re willing to do? Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution, says that Ryan’s plan offers “one of the few serious plans in Washington.” Yet he worries that “it is far too serious for today’s Republicans.”